BookPage Fiction Top Pick, May 2014

Paris may be known as the City of Light, but in Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, it serves as the backdrop for some of the darkest events of human history—and for an exhilarating new novel from writer Francine Prose.

Spanning several decades, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 kicks off in the 1920s, just as the city takes its first tentative steps toward renewal following the devastation of World War I. Artists and dreamers flock to the decadent nightclubs that thrum at the heart of the city, like the Chameleon Club, where patrons strip off societal norms and slip on new skins to express their true selves. That is where Lou Villars—a cross-dressing lesbian based on the real-life figure Violette Morris—finds refuge with a ragtag band of misfits made up of a photographer, a writer, a baroness and a French tutor, each linked by various romantic entanglements. Through the letters, memoirs and manuscripts of this quartet, alongside an unpublished biography of Lou, readers learn the details of Lou’s tragic history, which culminates in her final role as traitor and Nazi collaborator. Together, this symphony of voices attempts to reconstruct Lou’s fall from grace and shed some light on the darkness that might drive a person to such evil. However, as more pieces of Lou’s story are revealed, it becomes clear that it is not just beauty that lies within the eye of the beholder, but sometimes truth itself.

With more than a dozen novels to her name—including the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel—and several volumes of nonfiction, Prose is no stranger to exploring both fact and fiction, but seldom before has there been a more perfect union of the two. Her narrative slyly points out the fickle nature of memory as well as the inherent unreliability of all storytelling. As Prose breathes new life into Paris of a bygone era, even history buffs may find themselves unsure just how much Prose is pulling from history rather than her own imagination. Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 is a remarkable work of fiction that feels completely true. Richly atmospheric and utterly engrossing, it is not to be missed.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Francine Prose about this book.

Sicilian wax sculptor Gaetano Zumbo left his hometown of Siracusa, Italy, at age 19, amid rumors of betrayal and patricide. On the run from his past, he made his way across Italy and changed his name to Zummo, all the while earning acclaim for his wax sculptures of human bodies. He eventually stopped in Florence to join the Medici court at the request of the Grand Duke himself, Cosimo III, whose unreciprocated love for his wife has left him tortured—and leads him to make a strange request of the celebrated sculptor.

Secrecy tells the story of Zummo’s work to complete the Grand Duke’s request—a life-size, lifelike woman made entirely out of wax—and his subsequent romance with the apothecary’s daughter, Faustina. His newfound love proves dangerous, and not just because Faustina has secrets of her own: In 17th-century Florence, pleasure carries a price. As Zummo navigates the complexities of the Italian city, both geographically and politically, he must learn to make peace with his past, even when it turns up on his doorstep.

Rupert Thomson is a celebrated British author with nine novels to his name, including The Insult, which David Bowie named to his list of 100 must-read novels of all time, and Death of a Murderer, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year in 2007. Secrecy is full of bright, colorful descriptions of Florence, often including well-crafted metaphors and similes, which provide a perfectly contrasting setting to Zummo’s shady, twisted experiences.

Thomson’s thorough research and exceptional skill for the sort of detailed storytelling often missing in historical novels make Secrecy an absorbing and thrilling mystery, full of dark alleys, gray skies and cobblestone.

Haley Grogan is a full-time writer and editor living in Tuscaloosa, where she works as the assistant editor at the Alabama Alumni Magazine and as the managing editor of online magazine Literally, Darling.

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Irish-born author Emma Donoghue returns to historical fiction with her first novel since the 2010 runaway bestseller Room. Frog Music was inspired by a real-life unsolved murder in 1876 San Francisco, a good three decades after the Gold Rush. Cross-dressing Jenny, a voice of surprising common sense amid the wild culture of the time, was shot in cold blood at her friend Blanche’s house, and the murderer was never found.

It is evident that history is the star of this show. Blanche, a French dancer who supports her boyfriend, injured trapeze artist Arthur, by imaginative prostitution, gets in over her head when she invests in a block of apartments and finds herself unable to stay on top of the wave. When her child, whom she had imagined to be safe and cared for outside her life, surfaces in trouble, suddenly a more respectable life begins to exert its appeal.

Jenny makes a living by catching frogs to meet the considerable local restaurant traffic’s high demand, and she and Blanche cement their new friendship during expeditions out into the swamps and streams of the backcountry. Or do the two only know each other for a few hours before disaster strikes? The story is never quite clear, but the reader who is willing to live with ambiguity will find this book endlessly intriguing. Donoghue brings the setting, a smallpox-stricken summer, almost too vividly to life: The unwilling but fascinated reader will be transfixed by her descriptions of the disease’s “opalescent slime” and “dimpled red pearls . . . all across what used to be his lovely face.” References to some 30 songs of the time, many of them familiar (“How Can I Keep From Singing?” “Somebody’s Darlin’”) add to its period allure.

The French (“Frog”) connection may be strong, but this engrossing, truth-bending story is all American. You’ll find yourself enraptured by the intricate plot developments that will keep you revising your version of the action from one hour to the next.

To marry their daughters off, four social-climbing men in 1790s London hatch a plot: Buy a pianoforte (the au courant instrument of the late 18th century) and have them give a concert that will have noblemen lined up for their hands in marriage.

The ladies are as varied as their fathers are ambitious: emaciated Georgiana; Everina with her unfortunate false teeth; mysterious Alathea; and the Brass sisters, practical Harriet and lumpy Marianne.

The men hire a French pianist to teach the daughters, but Monsieur Belladroit has another agenda. He is working for the bitter man who made the pianoforte, whose own daughter is disfigured and will never be married off. Belladroit is paid to sabotage the girls’ performance, seducing them one by one as part of their training. Only Alathea, smart and independent, is immune to him. But she hides a dark secret about her relationship with her father, and her struggle to get out from under his control ends in a shocking act of violence.

Sedition could easily have dissolved into semi-kinky melodrama, a chronicle of Belladroit’s conquests. Thanks to author Katharine Grant’s sly writing, it never does. Just when things get tense, she lightens the mood with a dose of the competitive girls comparing notes on Belladroit, or even better, their truly doltish fathers comparing notes on their brilliant scheme. As the disastrous lessons progress, the clueless fathers congratulate themselves: “The die was cast; they could relax, though Brass had been stirring things, asking what would happen if Harriet married a duke and Marianne a baronet. Would one set of grandchildren have to bow to another?”

Grant is better known as K.M. Grant, an author of children’s books, including the de Granville trilogy. Sedition is her first adult novel, and while the ending may be a little too tidy for some, the book remains a thumping debut filled with sex, manipulation and a dash of romance. Wickedly dark and provocative, Sedition is a bold reminder that the thirst for power and status remains unquenched over the ages.

Ayelet Waldman (Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits) has written about personal tragedy numerous times: failed marriages, the struggles of motherhood, divided families. Her latest novel, Love & Treasure, deals with a larger human tragedy: the true story of the Hungarian Gold Train during World War II. It is a slight departure from her previous work, and yet, it remains just as powerful and inspiring.

Broken into three sections told over various periods of time, Love & Treasure follows three men: Jack, a young Jewish-American captain in Salzburg during WWII; Amitai, a famous Israeli-born art dealer in the current day who deals with repatriated items; and Dr. Zobel, a pioneering psychiatrist at the turn of the 20th century in Budapest. It begins with Jack, whose primary responsibility is to guard and take inventory for the Hungarian Gold Train, which was filled with stolen riches from exterminated Jews. There, he falls head over heels for Ilona, a striking Hungarian woman who has lost all her family to the concentration camps and is desperately holding out hope that her sister might have survived.

Then readers find Jack—50 years later—on his deathbed with cancer. It is there that he gives a stunning gemstone peacock pendant to his recently divorced daughter, Natalie Stein. His last wish is for her to return this item, stolen from the train, to its original owners, leading Natalie on an epic pilgrimage throughout Europe with Amitai, who finds himself quickly obsessed with both the pendant and Natalie herself.

The third section of the novel adds more layers to the story about the pendant’s origin and owner, but the heart of the novel is the story of Amitai and Natalie. Although the male characters control much of the narration, it is the female characters (Ilona, Natalie and the suffragette Gizella) who truly shine with their moxie, fiery spirits and utter determination. Whether they’re fighting for the rights of Jewish people, trying to secure the female vote or making sure a family promise is fulfilled, it is these leading ladies who make Love & Treasure a real treasure.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Ayelet Waldman for Love & Treasure.

Justin Go’s ambitious, sprawling and compelling debut novel, The Steady Running of the Hour, lurches from America to England, France, Sweden Germany and Iceland—even stretching to the Himalayas—switching back and forth in time from pre-WWI England to the present.

Tristan Campbell, a postgrad in California in 2004, receives a letter from an English law firm suggesting that he may be the sole inheritor of a sizeable fortune willed in 1924 to a beneficiary who, for all purposes, disappeared that year and never collected the funds, now worth millions. The evidence of his relationship to this beneficiary is tenuous at best, and Tristan is given the task of finding some piece of solid evidence in less than two months.

The novel’s intriguing premise leads Tristan in many directions, following flimsy clues that he hopes will eventually reveal that he is related to the beneficiary, his possible great-grandmother Imogen Soames-Andersson. Imogen and her older sister Eleanor, an artist, were the daughters of a Swedish diplomat and an accomplished English sculptress. They lived in London, where Imogen met explorer Ashley Walsingham in August 1916. The two embark on a brief but intense affair, each acutely aware that Ashley is to be deployed to the Western Front in only a week. After the war, Ashley joins a British expedition to Mt. Everest, where he loses his life—only weeks after leaving his entire fortune to Imogen and her descendants.

Despite a somewhat ambiguous ending, Go’s saga is engaging and infused with large dollops of mystery and romance. The Steady Running of the Hour should appeal to readers of each of these genres.

For those who mistakenly assume that PTSD is a malady of modern warfare, prize-winning author Helen Dunmore’s novel The Lie provides a poignant reminder that throughout history, the battle is far from over after a soldier returns home.

Such is the case for WWI veteran Daniel Branwell, whose return to his pastoral homeland in Cornwall proves to be no escape from the enemy. He is haunted by his morbid memories and crushing guilt over the death of his best friend Frederick. Dunmore’s deft and poetic narrative veers gracefully from realism to the supernatural—in particular, Daniel’s recurring glimpses of what appears to be Frederick’s restless ghost, invoking the horror of the trenches in all its grisly and grim detail.

While the reader is never quite certain if Daniel’s visions of his dead best friend are truly hauntings or simply hallucinatory, Dunmore provides a fresh counterpoint to the terrifying ambiguity of these scenes with the renewed friendship between the novel’s tormented antihero and Frederick’s stalwart sister, Felicia, a young war widow. Felicia is living with her toddler in the wealthy family’s cavernous manse, a place which holds both warm and chilling memories for Daniel.

As both Daniel and Felicia grieve over loved ones, the pair forge a bond that promises redemption—but which is soon threatened by a secret, the “lie” that is at the heart of Dunmore’s novel. It soon prompts suspicions that Daniel’s truth is not what it seems. As this impeccable and finely wrought literary tale winds to a chilling conclusion, readers will themselves be haunted by its evocative portrayal of a life-defining friendship and loss.

Jean Zimmerman’s new novel, Savage Girl, is the ideal historical fiction narrative: The history is accurate, and the story fits neatly into the facts.

The novel opens as Hugo Delegate, son of an outrageously wealthy captain of industry, is found next to the mutilated body of one of his friends. Because he cannot, or perhaps will not, explain why he was found at such a gruesome scene, he is taken into custody and asked to tell his side of the story.

 Savage Girl is alluring mystery set in one of the most fascinating times and places in American history.

Hugo tells a complex tale to his attorney about a mysterious girl that the Delegate family adopted while visiting their silver mines in Nevada. The Delegates attend a “freak show” where a girl who was purportedly raised by wolves puts on a somewhat provocative show for the drifters and miners every night. Anna-Maria Delegate, Hugo’s mother, wants to adopt the savage girl, named Brownyn, and save her from this hardly human existence.

After some complex negotiations with Bronwyn's owner, the family brings her back to New York City in their opulent private rail cars (all 13 of them), and get to work assimilating her into high society. However, tragedy seems to follow Bronwyn: Every time a man takes a romantic interest in her, he ends up dead. Is Bronwyn to blame with her survivalist upbringing and aggressive, animal-like instincts? Or is Hugo a jealous “brother” whose psychological well-being is teetering on the brink?

Zimmerman’s detailed descriptions of over-the-top Park avenue townhouses and sinfully gorgeous French ballgowns are captivating, but in addition to these more superficial signs of the time, she touches on industrial-age philosophical and economic issues, resulting in a book that is not just entertaining and suspenseful, but a thorough observation of America’s Gilded Age. Savage Girl is alluring mystery set in one of the most fascinating times and places in American history.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, March 2014

Alice Hoffman’s latest novel has the word “extraordinary” in the title for good reason: The best-selling author of The Dovekeepers has served up another historical novel that will dazzle readers until the last page. Set in New York City in the early 1900s, The Museum of Extraordinary Things veers from the extravagant mansions dotting the Upper West Side to the foul conditions of the overcrowded tenements on the Lower East Side to the seaside apartments stretched across Coney Island to tell the interwoven stories of Coralie Sardie and Eddie Cohen.

Coralie is the only child of a once-famous French magician who now runs The Museum of Extraordinary Things on Coney Island’s Surf Avenue. His curiosity show—packed with acts performed by so-called “freaks and oddities” like the Wolfman and Butterfly Girl—is being threatened by competing attractions that are being built nearby. Coralie was born with webbed hands, and unbeknownst to her, her father has been preparing her to one day become part of the museum. Nightly, Coralie is submerged in ice cold baths and forced to swim in the Atlantic Ocean in order to build up her tolerance to the cold and increase the strength of her lungs for holding her breath underwater.

On the Lower East Side, Eddie Cohen—a young Orthodox Jewish man who emigrated from Russia—has abandoned his job as a tailor, along with his father and his faith, to pursue a career in photography. Eddie spends his time photographing the crime beat for newspapers. As he is working the devastating Triangle Shirtwaist fire (which killed more than 100 young female laborers), Eddie is approached by a despondent father looking for his daughter. Despite his reluctance to get involved, Eddie finds himself agreeing to track her down. His investigation leads him to cross paths with Coralie, and both their lives are forever changed.

In The Museum of Extraordinary Things, both characters are searching for something. Coralie is desperate to escape from her father’s obsessive and abusive watch. Meanwhile, Eddie is attempting to make peace with himself and the fact that he abandoned not only his father, but also his God. As the two narratives gradually intertwine, Coralie and Eddie’s faith in both each other and themselves will be tested numerous times, only to come to an explosive head at the end of this powerful novel.

The term “Middle Ages” contains a prejudice: that the era was merely an unremarkable void straddling antiquity and modernity. Recent scholarship has eroded this perception. The era produced Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio as well as significant leaps in mathematics and even algorithms and cryptography. It was, moreover, a time when the lust for life was great and the powerful had lust aplenty. Bruce Holsinger’s captivating historical novel A Burnable Book is testimony to this more accurate view of a fascinating period.

The scene is London in 1385. Reigning over England is Richard II, later to adorn one of Shakespeare’s plays. The church is divided between Rome and Avignon while England hangs in the balance. A book, the “burnable” one of the title, appears, allegedly written during the reign of William the Conqueror. The book prophesies in historically accurate terms the death of every English king from William to Richard. Thus it falls to the book’s many temporary owners to decipher that prophecy and save, or not save, the reigning monarch.

But the true authorship of the book remains mysterious. Is it Chaucer, soon to write his Canterbury Tales? Is it Lollius, to whom the Roman poet Horace addressed one of his odes? Or is it the son of the novel’s narrator, who chews the fat with Chaucer and does some sleuthing of his own, even slinking into the brothels to ask prostitutes pointed questions? Thus the novel careens from court to academia, from house of God to house of ill repute, with scandalous overlap between the latter two.

The novel’s action proceeds at a steady clip and has the stench of authenticity, detailing everything from methods of torture to the happy custom of throwing refuse into the street. Its prose is erudite and focused, reading more like an academic thriller than a frilly period piece: John Grisham meets Umberto Eco. And Holsinger has clearly ventured to imbue his writing with the earthy English words that Orwell, among others, favored over their highfalutin’ Latinate counterparts. The language is also often bawdy, as befits a novel about bawds.

In his own book about England, Paul Theroux argued that England had been written about perhaps more than any other country, but the England he meant was likely that of Dickens, Austen or Hardy. About medieval England we know almost nil. This clever novel, as contemporary as it is distant, helps illuminate an England consigned for ages to a stagnant darkness.